Archive for the ‘Queens’ Category
eternal day
“follow” me on Twitter at @newtownpentacle
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Back in Queens, a humble narrator has been rather busy for the last few days.
Next week, the schedule of spring and summer Newtown Creek tours will be revealed to you at last, as well as some details about the ambitious schedule of boat tours which the Working Harbor Committee is planning. Short perambulations around the neighborhood have been my only distraction from the plotting and planning of this year’s excursions. Unnatural and unseasonable cold, however, has left the streets adorned in a drab winter appearance.
One starves for color.
from queensnyc.com
On Sunday, we joined over 140 people aboard a New York Water Taxi for the Working Harbor Committee’s tour of Newtown Creek. The tour was narrated by Mitch Waxman whose encyclopedic knowledge and passion for the area can be seen on his blog The Newtown Pentacle, and on his tours and work as the historian for the Newtown Creek Alliance.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Resorting to hanging around the produce departments of storefront merchants brings no surcease to this desire for the bright hues of Spring. Normally, one would expect the trees to show some sign of returning vitality and conscientious property owners would have already begun planting early varietal. Free ranging grasses should also be raising bright green shoots by now. Instead, the yellows and browns of winter linger, as does an unnatural chill.
One thirsts for warmth.
from nytimes.com
Not that Mr. Waxman is any sort of an academic. While the Newtown Creek Alliance, an environmental advocacy group, lists him as its resident historian, his credentials were earned on the street and the Internet, through countless solitary walks and countless nights poring over obscure archives.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Mainly, I’m just tired of hanging around in the cold wastes waiting for something to happen, and truly look forward to a day spent entirely out of doors and unencumbered by the heavy garments of an overly long winter. The next few months should be pretty interesting, lords and ladies, and without spilling a certain can of beans- pencil me in for May 26th.
One desires company.
from blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu
Usually it’s not a great thing when your memory of the first time you met someone person is inseparable from a terrible, gag-inducing stink. But with Mitch Waxman, it comes with the territory.
hollow voiced
“follow” me on Twitter at @newtownpentacle
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A specialized filter for my camera lens arrived one day, in the mail. I had not ordered the thing, but beggars cannot be choosers- as is oft repeated by area wags- and the optic element was attached. Happily enough, your humble narrator went about his tasks and recorded a few hundred images over the course of a few days whilst moving about the Megaloloplis.
When one emptied the memory card of the camera, loosing a flood of images onto the hard drive of my trusty computer, a phantasmagoric cavalcade of horror was unleashed. In “the field” these odd… they must be some sort of digital artifacts… lets just call them artifacts… artifacts were not displayed upon the preview screen of the camera nor were they detectable by any of the normal compliment of human senses.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Seeking to track down who sent me this bizarre optic, your humble narrator soon found himself in the back of a mobile phone franchise storefront, on Main Street in Flushing, arguing with an aged woman via the proxy and translations of her American born grandson. The old woman informed me that the package I had received, whose shipping address resolved back to the very shop she owned, was a complete mystery to her and that I should stop wasting her time and go find a job.
More than once, I thought that I spotted a young girl moving around behind the curtain separating the back room from the sales and service counters. It was an intuition, more than anything else, but I did hear a strange sort of clicking or gurgling back there and water was pooling on the floor. The girl was likely mopping up a flood and cursing under her breath, thought I.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Does this seemingly wholesome and quite utilitarian seeming lens filter have some coating or innate quality which allows it to discern the intangible, allowing the camera to record that occluded and squirming truth which is the true reality around us? Who sent this anonymous and possibly eldritch amulet to my home, and why?
In the week or so that these images have been festering on my hard drive, odd things have been happening around HQ. Sleep may never come easily again, as my computer has begun to randomly play early 1990’s modem sounds, and… sometimes the compositions in these images will appear change- entirely of their own accord. The shot above, for instance, is far more toothsome than when originally captured. Lets just call them… artifacts…
And if you believe anything like this fancily illustrated tall tale, especially on April 1, I’ve got this to sell you.
artificial means
“follow” me on Twitter at @newtownpentacle
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Maritime Sunday is suspended again this week, so as to incorporate the timely but dire warning that another Abomination has been spotted, moving freely through the community. This time the sighting was on Greenpoint Avenue in Sunnyside, whereas the last place and time I reported that such an entity walked amongst us was in Manhattan, back in December of 2012.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The beast had taken up station on the block opposite the park, and in some wild pantomime of clumsy gesticulations admonished passersby to accept a script of some kind. The blood chills thinking about what sort of bargain might be offered by such a creature, and one wonders if there are some things which might well be worth any cost.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The whirring staccato of my camera shutter attracted the attention of this rodent of great size, no doubt due to its overdeveloped auditory capabilities. Irregular coruscations of the cardiac action ensued deep within your humble narrator when the great beast suddenly stiffened and began to turn towards me, for given the speed legendarily attributed to its kind an attempt at escape would be, at best, a fruitless endeavor.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Cruelly baleful in expression, the monster fixed me in its glare while baring monstrous teeth, which were not fangs, instead its mandibular apparatus appeared to be bare plates of bone whose prominent shape and appearance reminded one of nothing less than the steel blades of jack hammers. ThIs halfling hare was around one and three quarter meters tall, and seemed both sturdily built and well armored by a dense hide which tended to hang loosely about its presumably sinewy limbs.
Watch your back out there today, it may be Easter Sunday, but this Abomination was lurking around, on the sunny side of the Newtown Pentacle, just yesterday.
Project Firebox 65
“follow” me on Twitter at @newtownpentacle
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Always on the look out for friendly neighborhood Fireboxes which have eluded my notice, this sturdy specimen was encountered on Astoria Blvd. at 42nd street. Unfortunately malfunctioning, it bears familiar signage adjuring the reader to rely on telephone contact with the Fire Department instead of using the alarm system.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
“Engine 263 and Ladder 117’s station house happens to be on the block” thought a humble narrator. “Why would there actually be a firebox on the same corner as a fire house” entered my mind next, but then I remembered that this was, after all, Queens. Logic and Queens are often exclusive of each other.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
No sign of the crews inside, so one imagines that this sign, advising one to use the broken firebox on the corner would need updating. Shame, as it is lovely typography.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A seeming memorial, this firebox like device ornaments a prominent spot on the building’s facade. The “343” is a reference to the number of FDNY personnel who perished at the World Trade Center at the turn of the century.
decreasing wind
“follow” me on Twitter at @newtownpentacle
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Foaming, your humble narrator was scuttling his way to Brooklyn recently when sonic evidence of certain titanic exertions, whose only source could be a locomotive engine at work, penetrated through my ever present head phones.
On this particular afternoon, nearby the so called “Bliss Tower” along those tracks of the Long Island Railroad which snake along beneath the Greenpoint Avenue Bridge in a nameless section of Queens, once known as Blissville but which I describe as DUGABO, it was a NY and Atlantic freight operation which was raising the ruckus.
from anacostia.com
New York & Atlantic Railway began operation in May 1997 of the privatized concession to operate freight trains on the lines owned by Long Island Rail Road. The railway serves a diverse customer base and shares track with the densest passenger system in the United States.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
My headphones were not playing Norwegian Black Metal, nor late 80’s NYC Hardcore. They were not transmitting one of my many H.P. Lovecraft audio books, the soundtrack from the first Omen movie, or any of my usual playlists of childish anthems and guitar driven ballads.
Instead, the audio files I was enthralled by were podcasts, specifically Dan Carlin’s “Wrath of the Khans” series, which is presented episodically at his Hardcore History show.
If you’re not listening to Dan, you’re missing out.
from wikipedia
There is an urban legend that Julius Caesar specified a legal width for chariots at the width of standard gauge, causing road ruts at that width, so all later wagons had to have the same width or else risk having one set of wheels suddenly fall into one deep rut but not the other.
In fact, the origins of the standard gauge considerably pre-date the Roman Empire, and may even pre-date the invention of the wheel. The width of prehistoric vehicles was determined by a number of interacting factors which gave rise to a fairly standard vehicle width of a little under 2 metres (6.6 ft). These factors have changed little over the millennia, and are still reflected in today’s motor vehicles. Road rutting was common in early roads, even with stone pavements. The initial impetus for the ruts probably came from the grooves made by sleds and slide cars dragged over the surfaces of ancient trackways. Since early carts had no steering and no brakes, negotiating hills and curves was dangerous, and cutting ruts into the stone helped them negotiate the hazardous parts of the roads.
Neolithic wheeled carts found in Europe had gauges varying from 130 to 175 centimetres (4 ft 3 in to 5 ft 9 in). By the Bronze age, wheel gauges appeared to have stabilized between 140 to 145 centimetres (4 ft 7 in to 4 ft 9 in) which was attributed to a tradition in ancient technology which was perpetuated throughout European history. The ancient Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians and Greeks constructed roads with artificial wheelruts cut in rock spaced the wheelspan of an ordinary carriage. Such ancient stone rutways connected major cities with sacred sites, such as Athens to Eleusis, Sparta to Ayklia, or Elis to Olympia. The gauge of these stone grooves was 138 to 144 centimetres (4 ft 6 in to 4 ft 9 in). The largest number of preserved stone trackways, over 150, are found on Malta.
Some of these ancient stone rutways were very ambitious. Around 600 BC the citizens of ancient Corinth constructed the Diolkos, which some consider the world’s first railway, a granite road with grooved tracks along which large wooden flatbed cars carrying ships and their cargo were pulled by slaves or draft animals. The space between the grooved tracks in the granite was a consistent 1.5 metres (4 ft 11 in).
The Roman Empire actually made less use of stone trackways than the prior Greek civilization because the Roman roads were much better than those of previous civilizations. However, there is evidence that the Romans used a more or less consistent wheel gauge adopted from the Greeks throughout Europe, and brought it to England with the Roman conquest of Britain in AD 43. After the Roman departure from Britain, this more-or-less standard gauge continued in use, so the wheel gauge of animal drawn vehicles in 19th century Britain was 1.4 to 1.5 metres (4 ft 7 in to 4 ft 10 in). In 1814 George Stephenson copied the gauge of British coal wagons in his area (about 1.42 metres (4 ft 8 in)) for his new locomotive, and for technical reasons widened it slightly to achieve the modern railway standard gauge of 1.435 metres (4 ft 8.5 in).
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Normally, the media I consume is not something I think people would be interested in, at least that’s been my experience in real life. A recent conversation with Kevin Walsh of Forgotten-NY fame, wherein that intrepid explorer queried me about where to find some of these Lovecraft audio files which are so often mentioned, forced me to reconsider that maxim. Accordingly, since its a holiday weekend and you might have some free time, here you go.
The Atlanta Radio Theater Company is great. The website… their stuff is available as mp3’s at itunes and others, so go hunt them down.
The astounding H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society.
ARTC made a better Dunwich, by my taste, but HPLHS did both “Mountains of Madness” and “Shadow Out of TIme” better and they made a freaking “Call of Cthulhu” silent movie as well as the unbelievably great “Whisperer in Darkness” film. Dark Adventure Radio Theatre just rocks.
Huge talents, a podcast performed by two of its associates is HPPodcraft.com.
Incidentally, just like the LIRR Engine 102 featured in yesterday’s post, today’s NY&A engine is an EMD SW1001.
from wikipedia
The EMD SW1001 was a 1,000-horsepower (750 kW) diesel locomotive for industrial switching service built by General Motors’ Electro-Motive Division between September 1968 and June 1986. A total of 230 examples were constructed, mainly for North American railroads and industrial operations.
The SW1001 was developed because EMD’s SW1000 model had proved unpopular among industrial railroad customers, as the heights of its walkway and cab eaves were much greater than those of earlier EMD switcher models. The overall height was similar, but the SW1000′s roof was much flatter in curvature. Industrial railroads that only operated switchers often had facilities designed to the proportions of EMD’s earlier switchers.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Gold standard, the best of the best unabridged readings are from Audiorealms, featuring narrator Wayne June. Flat out readings of the Lovecraft Texts by professional voice talent in a studio. Genre defining, these are commercial works which really deserve support. Buy em, highest Mitch Waxman ratings- lengthy, mellifluous, well worth the hard slaved money. Six volumes, covering all the really good stuff. I think I got them through iTunes, although audible.com has them for sale.
The unmentionable Jeffry Combs reads “Herbert West Re-Animator.”
Additional mentions for theatrical productions of “Call of Cthulhu” and “Lurking Fear,” pro recordings from “back in the day,” when audio books were released on things called “audio cassettes.” Check out lovecraftzine.com for a list of free downloads which includes these two gems.
Archive.org is hosting Maria Lectrix‘s readings of “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath.“ Free, and open sourced, go get em. Poke around at archive.org, by the way. This isn’t the only Lovecraft audio there- look for “Herbert West: Reanimator” and others.
from nyc.gov
Greenpoint Avenue is a four-lane local street in Queens and Brooklyn, running northeast from the East River in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to Roosevelt Avenue in Sunnyside, Queens. The Greenpoint Avenue Bridge, also known as the J. J. Byrne Memorial Bridge, is located approximately 2.2 km from the mouth of Newtown Creek. The bridge is situated between Kingsland Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and Review Avenue in the Blissville section of Queens.
